GoKawiilACME Updates
07Apr2026 https outage
Starting on February 25th and lasting a little over a month, acme.com suffered intermittent network outages. The symptoms were very high ping times and packet drops. The outages would last a few hours and then go away for a while.
The problems started right after my internet provider, Sonic, did some scheduled maintenance and switched me to a new network. I worked with Sonic support to try and figure out if their network change, or my own config changes for the new network, could have caused the problems. I did find some things I did wrong, but fixing them didn't fix the outages.
A few days ago I was up at 1am, filled with anxiety at yet another outage, and decided to take a harder look at the traffic I was getting. I noticed some interesting things:
Nearly all the incoming packets were web requests.
Nearly all of them were for non-existent pages.
Nearly all of them were on port 443 / https, not port 80 / http.
Nearly all of them proudly announced in the user-agent that they were LLM scraper bots.
I run two web servers on ACME, one for http that is very fast, and another for https which is kind of slow. Maybe the slow https server was falling behind? I decided to test this: I closed port 443.
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